Mail, AH and Banks

[Sylvari]

Excellent Idea!!! Make the Retainers the "Post Man"

[Alkoun]

And I've yet to see a majority of players ask specifically for Timed or Blind Bidding, Just an easy and convenient place to easily sell and buy items.

That's actually fine with me. Don't really need bidding. A market window that allows me to NEVER have to enter a market ward is great, and it'd be perfect if I never even have to talk to my retainer (except maybe to get mail or store items, but setting up sales? no ty. I'd rather use a market window to do that).

Edit: I voted on the poll too. Thanks for that.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-Auction-House

[Blue79]

1. I don't see why we STILL don't have a mail system, I haven't seen one person saying they did not want it added

2. Why can't they have both AH (NOT blind bid but selling at fixed price) AND market wards ie. keep AH to limited slots like the 10 we have per retainer, but have retainers rent-able for x gil/week so more focused crafters can have a place to sell 20 rings if they want, or the stacks of mats they'd otherwise vendor due to lack of room to sell. AH is a basic function we're lacking, markets can augment that function but not replace it IMO

[Rubicon]

I've already posted multiple times an idea for the MW that incorporates all the good stuff about an AH (time and convenience) without implementing the shitty stuff (Timed Bidding, Blind Bidding, and Price History).

1. Remove the Physical Wards.
2. Make the Wards a Menu
3. When you search for an item it does like it does now and lists the retainer of the user with the lowest price first.
4. Clicking the retainer opens their inventory in a new menu and lets you buy the item you were searching for, It also keeps the "Window Shopping" Effect.
5. You can blind search the lists of retainers still.
6. When you buy an item its delivered to a mailbox. Go pick it up.

I like this but instead let us keep a retainer in a house (instanced) that does this instead of a menu.

[Zenge]

I got an idea for how a MW/AH works.

Have a single Market ward area labeled "Market Wards."
You enter it.
You see several empty Vendor counters.
You approach it.
Menu pops up.
Pick an item you want of any category.
the selected NPC that carries the item appears behind the vendor counter.
You buy the item and the NPC offers other items that is in the bag.
You dismiss the retainer, as the retainer bows or say goodbye and disappears.
Begins looking up another item.

It's very convenient as you don't need to travel each area for a single item and still see other player's retainers, while having the shopping feel.

[Seif]

I don't understand people who want to add more steps to the buying process by having the items sent to the player house. If I'm buying new gear 99% of the time I want to equip it right away.

I would go even further than adding XI style AH I think when buying a new piece of gear the player should be offered a command to equip it right away and even better an option to see new gear and stat changes compared to the previous gear like most -98 era rpgs did.

I think in all of the FF games they nailed gear buying best in IX of all games. There was never any guesswork on the stat changes and you could see all the info you needed in one screen.

(I also loved the skills learned from items but that's another story)

[Bebekurenai]

There's not even a mail/PM system on these forums. It made me think once the forums got oficial and out of beta phase, and added the character information this would include a way to comunicate aka leave a message to someone mayhaps, but seems SE doesn't see it like that.

[AshToreth]

First off, I'm not an advocate of "What? No AH? This game is crap". I sit firmly on the fence of whether we need an AH or whether the wards can be improved to the point that the idea of an AH is redundant.

But I would like to point out that an AH isnt all "bed of roses".
Inroducing an AH would have to be done intelligently as it would be a hive of activity that I dont think the servers are capable of withstanding at this time. Who recalls the AH in Whitegate in FFXI? The lag was inconcievable to the point that I'd only use it in an emergency.

Perhaps if the AH was a seperate zone in itself with a bolstered server just to handle the load, maybe that would work, but I'm no programmer so I am only speaking in layman's terms.
If they can overcome the lag issues that come with a busy AH, I'd buy that.

But until the servers are robust enough to cope, I will settle for more funcionality on the wards. Being able to compare gear stats of gear currently worn with the item you are thinking of purchasing would put a big smile on my face for a start

[Onidemon]

Still no feedback on these? The whole community is very interested in these, especially an AH or Market system. I don't intend on attacking anyone with this comment but, the market wards/retainer is a broken and overly complicated system. It seems to me and to the other players that the only reason why SE is investing into trying to improve it is only because they plan on making us pay extra $ for retainers.

Making us pay extra $ for characters and now extra retainers, seems a bit greedy to me and i'm sure a lot of players out there think the same thing. I don't know of any other MMORPG having that mentality and even more some are adopting the free to play strategy or no monthly fee but pay for extra items, game feautres etc...

If FFXIV has any chance of competing with the other great MMOs out there, we need to have these systems in place and we need to drop that mentality of let's keep broken stuff because there is extra money to be made with it.

[Jennestia]

Feedback:

Mail system - They already stated will come when the servers are fixed. They don't need to repeat this every day.

AH - Unneeded. They already stated they're working on the MW system and for the most part they're pretty much the same system. We don't need a 'centralized' area before they even balance the game out, it's actually only going to make matters worse.

You're not paying for anything, so that argument is moot.

Bank - Unless you're regarding storage, this is what retainers also are for. A monetary bank system would do no good with a serverside interface because the workload to call 1000s of player's banks, sometimes simultaneously would hinder game performance.

XIV will draw in it's own playerbase or it wouldn't be called Final Fantasy XIV, it would be called Generic Fantasy Clone Infinity, just like Rift purposefully designed itself to be a WoW clone to pull in that group of players and how GW2 is trying to cater to the crowd tired of said games.

So to reiterate:

the only reason why SE is investing into trying to improve it is only because they plan on making us pay extra $ for retainers.

Proves you've never played MMORPGs beyond XIV before -- If you have, you wouldn't have said this, because every MMORPG since the 90s improved existing systems overtime.

The only time something was scrapped was because they reintroduced the system in a new way, MW and Retainer system only need adjustments instead of wasting resources and designing and implementing a generic auction house. How many times have they stated they're heavily considering resource allocation?